OMG, what have the arty Italians done to my book?
Perhaps a humanities person can “unpack” the meaning of this cover.
Bello o strano?
May 22, 2011 • 7:57 am
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Tee hee… bellissimo!
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1349420740818&set=a.1036555879392.2007881.1390333971&type=1&theater
Not on feacesbook – what is it, pretty please Steve?
Same here.
http://dgtweb.nmsu.edu/bgiles/images/main_page_pics/mr_natural.jpg
Here it is. I can access the original link, did a quick google search for you.
Thanks, tort! 😀
(A bit long-winded, like so much artsy-fartsy stuff…!
Best. Cover. Ever.
Looks like the new cover for “Das Kapital.”
Is that supposed to be a homo-erectus version of yourself? At any rate, I love it.
Oh boy, I don’t know about that one. I bet the threads are quality though…
Brilliant ! I note that the Italian publisher Codice has Perché l’evoluzione è vera tagged (see bottom of page) as: “darwin, genetica, pseudoscienza, teorie evoluzioniste” 🙂
It’s a monkey in a suit? I suppose that can be connected with what the book is about.
I think it’s meant to be an ape, not a monkey.
It almost looks like a sheep head…
Didn’t you get a say in this?
Mind you, it is a rather sweet looking ape-thing.
It is supposed to have a meaning? Look at the pretty clouds!
Ook!
It’s a picture of the Apean Way….
Groan!
moar groan!
It’s a poignant statement about how we’re merely apes in suits, adrift in a field of gold. A naturalistic observation that ties together the distant past with the present in a timeless environment (on the scale of the ape-man, the only upper organism visible in the painting). A secondary meaning can be found that it is also a sly reference to the future in that the ape is actually a rendition of Cornelius from ‘Planet of the Apes’. Thus past, present, and future meet on the timeless plane of existence.
…plains of existence.
Can I haz my tenure now?
No. There are no footnotes to Derrida.
lmao!
Plane was good too. 8/10
“Society is intrinsically meaningless,” says Derrida; however, according to Scuglia, it is not so much society that is intrinsically meaningless, but rather the stasis or punctuation of species.
In a sense, Debord suggests the use of dialectic postsemioticist theory to attack the status quo. The subject is interpolated into a constructivist libertarianism that includes narrativity as a whole.
Therefore, Foucault promotes the use of neopatriarchial nationalism to deconstruct sexual selection. In Perche l’evoluzione e vera, Coyne reiterates dialectic postsemioticist theory; in Speciation he and Orr affirm subdialectic narrative.
Hence, a “man” in an “ape” suit in a field of yellow “flowers” contextualises the subject into a premodern paradigm of consensus that includes language as a paradox.
(modified from the Postmodernism Generator)
I am in awe.
Not just yellow flowers, rape flowers, known to scientistic modernists as Brassica napus. Derrida postulates that flowers are a metaphor for rape, whereas the post-colonialist discourse holds that rape is a metaphor for flowers.
Planet of the Apes was the first thing that came to my mind. Followed by Dance, Monkies, Dance…
( http://youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24 )
O come on, Jerry! Stop playing hard to get..! The publishers asked you to put on a monkey head for the publicity shoot….! It’s really you under there, isn’t it..! David in Salford, UK.
No, I believe it’s former U.S. President George W. Bush.
He would not have needed to wear a mask.
You’re both wrong, it’s obvious Silvio Berlusconi. I think they are trying to show what happens when one doesn’t evolve…
No, then the ape would have been in a Hawaiian shirt, cowboy boots, smoking an aged Cuban cigar…
Author portraits on the front cover of books aren’t all that rare…
Seems to be a rape field rather than a field of gold and that puts an additional twist to it.
Indeed. A demonstration of the hegemony the ape man enjoys. It invites the question: does the ape-man also wear trousers? And just what is he doing with his hands? The painting invites one to speculate on endless possibilities. There are no incorrect answers.
I can see that you appreciate a good brassica! They are SO versatile! I love the scent though some find it cloying…
They could so easily have skipped the necktie and then the figure would have been androgynous.
Be silent, woman.
¿?
What’s that, a “joke“? Is that you being funny? Ha-fucking-ha.
That IS funny Jose
I’m awfully sorry about that outburst. After being chided on the ‘Jersey Shore’ thread, I’ve decided that all aesthetic matters are relative, and there’s really no objective criteria to judge anything, really. So I’ve switched from my popcorn-pumped Ethiopian Sidamo to Folgers Crystals Decaffeinated. I should be better soon.
Ophelia. Annie Hall is dead, but…
Marlene Dietrich, Brenda Wash, Leighton Meester, Patti Smith, K D Lang, Luella Bartley, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, Ellen Page, Patti Smith
(Smith twice ’cause she deserves it)
…Annie Lennox, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Kate Moss… http://plushnylonmag.com/newsbite/who-said-women-cant-wear-neckties
I quite like it.
(Italians are so fond of yellow…)
THE DESCENT OF arMANi
Perhaps it is designed to catch one’s eye and interest the reader? Or is that too out there?
It’s a clothes-wearing primate. Not an unusual sight. Seems to have gotten lost on his way to the office, though.
The man hides behind the chimpanzee mask. hmmmm… would have been better had a chimp hidden behind the human mask. I think he is saying that we are animals parading as civilized creatures. I bet the photograph is not Italian. It must have been taken in Late April or early/mid May. There must be a picture credit?
“monkey men all
in business suits
teachers and critics
all dance the poot”
I’m waiting for some creationist to use this to tie evolution with rape, since the apeman is standing in a rapeseed field.
Pero, e bello!
Why am I thinking of an album cover for Beck?
Probably connecting through the video for “Loser,” about 40% of which is shot on some sepia sort of film and which begins with Beck taking off some kind of mask (though not necessarily ape or monkey; IIRC it was fuzzed out on MTV) while “singing”: “In a time of chimpanzees I was a monkey…”
Ooooh! You are GOOD!!! F’n Sherlock here!
Using my whole semesters of humanities training, I have determined that this is…
A man in an ape suit.
If you really want to stretch it, you could say it’s an ape in a man suit. See what I did there?
He looks kind of wistful, as though he thinks he should never have come down from the trees cause this is what it leads to, suits and farming.
and digit watches
erm..digital*
The cover in unsettling. Like a mix of magritte and de chirico.
Yes, the answer to the title question is Both, of course.
🙂
Did the designer charge a lot, or he payed you to let him get a first job? LOL
An excellent avatar!
The ape’s standing in a field of what? A big yellow field means one thing to me – canola. Canola oil = low erucic acid rapeseed oil, and the plant is still called raps in Swedish. Is this somehow significant to the cover and part of some pun?
No, you are wrong. What you are saying is merely idle speculation.
The cover is reminiscent of a Magritte painting, but without the bowler hat.
Man as an animal looking ridiculous and out of place in the natural world and with his back turned away from the heavens, which are lit with the glory of God.
.. or something like that.
Hey, at least it’s a well dressed ape.
I actually like the cover. I’d wager a lot of people in bookstores are going to thumb that book just because the cover is so unusual.
I hope the author photo isn’t also apefied.
Obviously planet of the apes. You can’t object to that, right?
Thank god they didn’t put the usual “ascent of man” sequence in the cover, but a picture by Joel Micah Miller (this guy: http://www.joel-miller.net/). And, by the way, Codice is the best science publisher in Italy; don’t blame the artsy italians 😎